Ha! I told you I would do SOME kind of fiction...this is half fiction, half real, as are most of our creations.

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"Old coffee."

"Excuse me?"

She leaned over the counter, smiling in the dull yellow light, her hair frizzed and pushed to the side above her semi-uniform of white shirt and jeans. "The coffee's old. You'd do better gittin' somethin with sugar."

"Thanks." I turned and headed for the snack aisle. My shoes made clicking noises on the floor, amplified by the buzzing of the fluorescent light hanging overhead in the convenience store. The door opened behind me and I glanced over to see some anonymous figure slouch in wearing all denim and a black shirt with some kind of hunting logo on it. He tipped his hat to the woman at the counter.

"Mornin', Jim," she nodded. That's right...morning. What did I want to eat? I fiddled with my car keys, staring at the array of snack food. Not really breakfast...but that apple pie looked good. The little packaged kind, of some knock-off brand of Little Debbie's. I picked one up and carried it back to the counter.

Through the glass doors it was still pitch-dark, and I could see my friends half-asleep in the car. Earlier, looking up at the sky, we had seen black and deep blue meeting the canyon wall and the creek trees in jagged stripes, but there was as yet no sign of dawn. I yawned hugely and smiled apologetically at the woman as I handed her the apple pie.

She rang it up and I paid her, putting pennies in the change jar. "Have a good night," she said, waving. I smiled and nodded; at four in the morning, night and day are indistinguishable.

Pushing through the doorway to the outside night, the only difference I noticedwas that the cool breeze of an hour ago had diminished. I stood under the light from the gas pumps and looked out toward where I knew the river to be, marked by a few lights miles upstream. The air held the warm heaviness of pavement in the summer night, and I could hear frogs and crickets from the creek not a block away before it emptied into the river. The car next to mine was dark, looking oddly abandoned in the glare from the "GAS" sign that turned forlornly above the store. I jingled my keys and waved to my friends in my car, looking out into the darkness. Maybe that was a deep blue over the hills of the canyon, or maybe it was just my tired brain trying to comprehend the fact that it was safe to stand out here at four in the morning. Once I got back into the car and drove to my friend's house, the other friend that we had seen off at three-thirty in the morning would be really gone, and all the hugs and last goodbyes would be final. I would be leaving a part of myself here as well; this was my last summer at home before I left for college. I felt as though it were my last summer night, period. I listened to the crickets in the darkness again, beyond the yellow of the gas pump lights that reflected off Jim's boat, and went to unlock my car door.

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